Fearnation

An MCP server that searches fearnation.club news archive (世界苦茶 daily digest + 台海危機 ALERT) at item-level granularity.

Features

• Full historical corpus: one-time full crawl of all sitemap-discovered posts.
• Incremental updates: RSS feed auto-refresh on tool calls when stale (>60 min).
• Cross-script search: OpenCC t2s normalization lets Simplified Chinese queries match Traditional Chinese content (and vice versa).
• 4 tools: search_news, get_post, list_recent, discover.

Installation

git clone <this-repo> fearnation-mcp
cd fearnation-mcp
uv venv
uv pip install -e ".[dev]"

Usage (MCP client config)

Claude Desktop (claude_desktop_config.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "fearnation": {
      "command": "/absolute/path/to/fearnation-mcp/.venv/bin/fearnation-mcp",
      "args": []
    }
  }
}

Cursor and other MCP clients: same command path with empty args.

Tools

search_news(query, section?, date_from?, date_to?, limit?, mode="and")

Full-text search over the indexed news items. Returns matches with slug, section, headline, body, pub_date, seq.

• mode="and" (default): every whitespace-delimited keyword must match, e.g. 华为 美国 matches an item containing both terms anywhere.
• mode="phrase": the complete query must match in the given order, e.g. 华为 发布 only matches that exact phrase.

get_post(slug_or_date)

Fetch a full post by slug (shijie-kucha-2024-01-15) or ISO date (2024-01-15). For dates with multiple posts, returns a list of summaries.

list_recent(days=7)

List recent posts within N days. Each result has slug, title, pub_date, post_type, item_count. Use to orient before searching.

discover(query?, post_type?, date_from?, date_to?)

Browse the post catalogue. Filter by title substring, post_type (世界苦茶 or 台海危機ALERT), or date range.

Development

# Run tests (excluding network tests)
uv run pytest

# Run linters
uv run ruff check src tests
uv run black --check src tests
uv run pyright src

# Run network smoke tests (requires network access)
uv run pytest -m network tests/test_smoke.py

# Run the server locally for testing
uv run fearnation-mcp

Design

See docs/superpowers/specs/2026-07-08-fearnation-mcp-design.md.

Contributors

• Star-Trails — author, maintainer
• OpenCode — AI coding assistant used throughout development (spec design, TDD implementation, code review)

License

MIT — see LICENSE.